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Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Get back on t’land whe’re y’belong

Aunty Bina's Farm

The Vale of York locks fingers with the Trent, Ouse, Aire and Don across an expanse of low-lying land known as
the Humberhead Levels. In winter there is little protection from the cold winds
that blow uninterrupted up and down the vale, or along the estuary from the North Sea.
In the autumn, thick fogs drift in from the rivers and rise up from the fields.
In summer the baking sun cracks the soil into deep fissures. Parts of it are
warpland, where turbid river waters were once diverted to flood the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. Some call it ‘pancake country’ because of
its never-ending flatness. Stand upon the slightest rise and in one direction
you can see the chalky yellow-green line of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. Turn the other
way, and you can just make out the grey-brown smudge of the Yorkshire Pennines.

The region is dotted with remote villages and isolated
farms. Aunty Bina’s farm was along a deserted lane that
stretched straight and level from the village where my grandma lived, past
enormous, silent fields of sugar beet, wheat, potatoes and fallow grass. Hardly anyone goes down that lane now except in a motor vehicle, but in days gone by we walked from
the village, a good two miles, me and my younger brother running happily ahead
of grandma wheeling baby cousin Anna in her pram. In my imagination it was an
expedition through a strange and extraordinary land. It came back vividly, years
later, on reading about the distant tracts of Tolkein’s Middle Earth and the
care-free floating islands of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra.

Cousin Anna had been living with us while Aunty
Bina had been in hospital for an operation. She was supposed to have been in for
just a couple of weeks, but things went wrong and it was four months before
she got out. Even then she was still too ill to cope with a one-year old, so Anna
stayed with us for longer. She had learned to walk and talk before she went
home. Some of our neighbours assumed my mother must have had another baby. It
meant, though, that we visited the farm frequently for Bina to see Anna. It
also meant we could play on the farm with cousin Brian.

I loved going to the farm. There were sweet
smelling hay stacks to climb and burrow in, quiet shady barns to explore, nests
of semi-wild, warm, furry kittens to stroke and befriend, and away across a
field a mysterious, dark wood with fallen tree trunks to scramble over. In
summer, when the wheat grew long, you could make mazes of channels and trenches
to crawl through and hide, so long as Brian’s dad, Uncle Ben, didn’t spot you. He
was usually somewhere out on the farm, but the one time he caught us flattening
his corn just before harvest time there was hell to pay, especially by Brian
after we had left.

I liked playing with Brian, despite being twice
his age. I never found it hard being with younger children, possibly because my
brother was quite a lot younger too. It was only awkward when another friend my own age was
present, when it seemed both embarrassing and inconsiderate at the same time; embarrassing
because playing with the younger friend risked ridule from the older one, and
inconsiderate because paying attention to the older friend was to ignore the
younger one. I even became expert at entertaining baby Anna, provided none of
my school friends were around.

If I could have analysed this more deeply
at the time, I might have beaten Basil Bernstein to his concept of restricted
and elaborated linguistic codes, the obvious idea that you talk to different people in different ways. I knew exactly what he meant when I came
across it in some dull sociology text book years later. But, as they say,
sociologists only tell us what we know already.

Aunty Bina and Uncle Ben had married at the
church across the road from my grandma’s house on a snowy February day when I
was little. They lived in a series of smallholdings of gradually increasing
size, one of them a winding walk along the river bank. Later they took the farm
at the end of the long lane, where some of the farm buildings were at least two
hundred years old.

Ben was a hands-on farmer, accustomed to
hard lonely hours on the land, with the farmer’s practical toughness towards
matters of life and death. Once, making our way along the lane, we spotted him
in the distance, across a field, standing motionless with his shotgun, daring any
crows or wild rabbits to covet his crops, or as he would have said, “shuttin’
t’crows an’ t’rabbits.” He had sheds of egg-laying hens, but for farmers, there
can be no room for sentiment when a hen’s egg-laying begins to decline. He had
a series of farm dogs, loud, ferocious, vicious things that sprang up at your
face on chains, snarlingas you edged past, back against the wall. I never thought to ask what
happened when they got too old, or what became of the litters of kittens
produced by the semi-wild farm cats. In later years, he regularly bought white
Charolais calves, and raised them almost like his own family, but in the end they
were always dispatched off for slaughter and replaced by new ones. He called
them “be-asts”, splitting the word into two syllables.

He was a big man. I once sat behind him at a
wedding and marvelled at the breadth of his back, just like one of his own ‘be-asts’,
the result of years of hard physical work. But he knew his job thoroughly, the
diversity of skills involved, how to operate complicated machinery, how to
calculate quantities of feeds and fertilisers, how to buy calves, when to sow
and harvest crops, when the weather said to wait a little longer, and when the
weather said it was all right to hide indoors out of harm’s way and play pool
with Brian, or watch cricket on television. Aunty Bina would have been quite
happy to retire to a little cottage in the village, but Ben would not entertain
the idea, and continued raising Charolais for market, even when he was “pushin’
eighty”, as Bina put it.

Uncle Ben’s rural toughness applied to his
dealings with people too. He could seem rude and aggressive if you were not
used to him, and more than one relative refused to have anything to do with
him. We used to tell ourselves we went to the farm to be insulted. As I got
older he always looked me critically in the beard and said, “You scruffy
bugger! What’s up? Can’t th’afford a razor?” And when it started to go grey it
was, “Why! Bloody ‘ell! Look who it is! It’s bloody Father Christmas.”

I once went with my dad in a new car I’d
bought, and he came in saying, “I couldn’t see who it wa’ from ove’ the’re across o’t’
field, except it wa’r a rich bugger wi’ a new car an’ a scruffy bugger wi’
whiskers.” I didn’t dare tell him it was my car, and I was both the rich and the
scruffy bugger.

I don’t know how many of Brian and Anna’s
prospective girl- and boyfriends he saw off with his dismissive manner. One of Brian’s
girlfriends was a teacher. You can imagine the likely scene when he eventually
took the educated young lady home to meet his father.

“What the ‘ell do you see in ‘im then? He’s
a right ugly sod! Still, you won’t bugger up two ‘ouses.”

Ben’s confrontational style of humour came
straight out of pre-war country village life, stemming from the days when field
workers were always in the company of others, laughing, joking and exchanging
banter as they laboured in groups, forking straw on to wagons drawn by horses.
But by the nineteen sixties things had changed, and farmers worked long hours
on their own, driving up and down, up and down, on their tractors. So Ben saved
up his acerbic wit for visitors. If you were in tune with it, he was one of the
wittiest people you could ever hope to meet.

If I ever had an accent like that, then
regretfully I lost it living in other parts of the country. I was unaware just how
much until one day, over the telephone, I was dismayed to hear Ben telling Bina
“th’s some posh bugger asking fo’ y’r on t’phone.” When Bina came on the phone
I could hear her defending me. “Why, it’s not anybody posh,” she told Ben, “it’s
on’y our Tasker,” and then to me said “I suppose y‘ave to talk proper like that
when y’r at work.”

Farmers had to be self-reliant and self-sufficient.
Life was unforgiving and there was no place for layabouts and moaners. You just
got on with it, no matter what problems chance dealt you. Aunty Bina had a bad
leg which started when she fell off a stepladder at one of their early
smallholdings. It damaged the blood supply to her hip, but it wasn’t properly
diagnosed at the time, and the bone died. That’s why she had been in hospital. She
had a hip replacement that didn’t work, and ended up with an immobilised hip
and permanent abscesses on her leg and foot. But she still did her jobs,
limping around the house and farm without complaint, even when in later life
the treatment for the abscesses raised the levels of copper in her bloodstream,
causing partial sightedness. She once wrote me a letter from hospital, mentioning
she had had a “minor” stroke, but not to worry because she had seen the doctor
straight away, and had been all right since. “She wants bloody shuttin’,” Ben
would say.

Ben had his own problems, blood pressure, farmer’s
lung from years of exposure to hay and fertiliser dust, and he was not allowed
to drive because of epilepsy. I once saw him cutting winter turnips “fo’ t’be-asts”
and was shocked by his breathlessness,
and the colour he turned. But he, too, just got on with things. In any case,
even with epilepsy, farmers are still allowed to take their tractors on public
roads, and he would if he felt so inclined, holding back long queues of impatient
drivers, desperate to overtake.

The best way to handle Ben’s prickly comments
was just to shake your head and ignore them. That’s what Aunty Bina did, but
there were some who returned as good as they got. One day, they were visited at
the farm by ‘our Mary’, an overweight elderly relative, and a similarly
overweight friend, who arrived side by side on bicycles, gliding slowly down the
lane, tyres bulging to bursting point, suspension compressed to the limits, fat
thighs straining at the pedals, saddles submerged inside the overhanging folds
of their abundant bottoms.

“Look who it is!” shouted Ben from his
stackyard. “It’s t’bloody Rolly Pollies.”

“Bugger off y’dirty farmer all blattered up
in cow muck”, came the reply. “Get back on t’land whe’re y’belong!”

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About Me

I grew up in Yorkshire and worked in Leeds before going to university late. I then lived in various places around the U.K. before moving back to Yorkshire where I now live with my wife and family. This memoir is based on people, places, things and events I knew, with some names and details altered to avoid difficulties. I hope to post once or twice each month.